


A shift in the air

by RedChucks



Category: Nathan Barley (TV)
Genre: M/M, Ridiculous sappy romance, a touch of sexy times too, it is I the purveyor of terrible romance, what else?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 10:07:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16808518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedChucks/pseuds/RedChucks
Summary: Dan wakes. It is two hundred and sixty-four days since he jumped out of the window and out of his old life.





	A shift in the air

There’s a shift in the air, that’s what wakes Dan, but he doesn’t wonder at how something so subtle could spark his mind when he usually sleeps through anything. He wonders about it later, much later, but right then he’s just aware, suddenly, that he’s awake, and that someone has shifted the way they’re sitting, someone wearing a clunky studded belt that’s been gaff-taped on one side, and too many cheap plastic bracelets. The music is low, a soft hum from the corner barely louder than the scratching and turning of the record, and it’s a cue, a clue to Jones’ mood.

“What’re you doing?” Dan mumbles, refusing to open his eyes, scrunching them shut even more tightly against the inevitable fact of a new day.

“Sketching,” comes the reply, soft if a bit rough around the edges. “Sketching you.” 

Jones has been out for most of the night, torturing the world with his noise, and it always leaves him hoarse afterwards in a way that makes Dan’s chest tighten. He enjoys it more than he thinks he should. Once upon a time he would have reacted to Jones’ words very differently, he ponders. The first time he’d sat bolt upright, hating the very idea of someone doing something so intimate. He’d been lying on the sofa after a party at which someone had photographed him in the middle of getting a mediocre blow job, and had then gone on to have very disappointing, semi-public sex, yet the thought of Jones sketching out his likeness while he slept seemed far more personal, revealing in a way that Dan couldn’t bear at the time.

He’s come a long way, he thinks as he cracks an eyelid to steal a glance at the man sitting on a pile of sofa cushions in the centre of the floor. Once he would have told Jones to fuck off, to stop being so weird, so gay - now he just grins sleepily and lets the man do whatever he wants, his chest tightening all the more at the sight of Jones’ scruffy hair and ripped t-shirt, the way his lips are pouting as he concentrates, the way his smudged eyeliner accentuates the intensity of his gaze as he studies the lines of Dan’s body like he’s something worthy and precious. It’s almost enough to make Dan believe it, but no matter how far he’s come in the last two hundred and sixty-four days since his last drink, since his last day at SugarApe, since he jumped out of the Trashbat window, he hasn’t come quite that far.

“Try to get my good side,” he grumbles all the same, closing his eye when he hears Jones’ breathy laugh.

“They’re all good sides,” Jones tells him gently, his pencil scratching faintly against the paper. “You just can’t see ‘em the way I can is all. It’s why I gotta sketch you and paint you and make music ‘bout you - so’s you’ll know.”

“Proper Renaissance man, you are,” Dan mumbles, pushing his head down further in to the pillow, wishing the sofa was just a little longer so he could stretch out more. He has a suspicion that his arse is sticking up in the air and that Jones has probably (not for the first time) chosen to focus on that particular feature of his anatomy. He wriggles a bit but stops at the sound of Jones tutting and tries to lie still and relaxed, even though it’s difficult now that he’s aware of Jones’ eyes on him. “Sorry.”

“Nah, don’t be,” Jones tells him consolingly. “I’ve been at it a while anyway. If you need to get up for a slash or whatever, that’s fine.”

Dan really doesn’t want to get up but his brain’s been given the prod now and suddenly his bladder’s screaming at him and he rolls off the sofa with a groan, hating the cracking of his knees as he climbs to his feet, blinking down at where Jones is sat cross legged in his nest of pillows and blankets and paper. Dan feels so old sometimes, like he’s aging in double time, whilst Jones seems eternally youthful, and Dan glares at the man’s knees, wondering why they don’t crack and protest the way Dan’s do. 

“You right?” Jones asks lightly, but he’s holding his sheaf of paper and his pencil tight to his chest and there’s a line forming between his brows that Dan wants to banish forever because Jones should never have to worry, let alone about Dan, yet he’s seen that anxious expression on his friend’s face too often, and he hates himself for being the cause of it.

“I’m fine,” is all he can manage to say in response but even though Jones nods the crease in his forehead remains and Dan feels the guilt begin to crush him the longer he looks at it. “I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll be here,” Jones offers in response, the words drifting down the hall behind Dan as he hobbles to the loo, grimacing at the pins-and-needles sparks that are sizzling through his limbs. 

He takes longer than he needs to. It’s like he’s daring the stillness of the morning to snap, staring at his own haggard reflection for so long he feels sure Jones will be gone by the time he returns. He’s probably up and making coffee by now, Dan tells himself, or back behind his decks with his headphones on. You don’t deserve someone who’s willing to wait for you, who’s willing to put up with your bullshit. Dan agrees, hating himself for giving in, as always, to the self-destructive loathing that sits behind his eyes.

But instead of an empty room when he returns Jones is there, stretched out on the cushions, relaxed and cat-like, his shirt ridden up to expose his sharp hip bones and winter snow skin and dark, wiry hair. 

It’s almost too much. Dan very nearly bolts from the room, though god knows where he’d go, but in reality it’s far easier to let his rusted knees give way and fall to the floor at Jones’ side, and at his mercy.

“God, you’re glorious,” he hears himself whisper, but it’s impossible to focus on the words leaving his mouth when his fingers are skimming across that thin, soft skin, watching Jones arch in to the touch, accentuating the lines of his lithe body and the bulge in the front of his jeans. “Why are you wasting paper drawing me? You should be looking in the mirror. You’re a fucking masterpiece.”

Jones chuckles softly, darkly, and lifts his hands to tangle them in Dan’s untidy curls. His hair has grown, probably too long, but he can’t bring himself to cut it, not when Jones seems to find such pleasure in pushing his fingers through it and tugging it and holding on to it as he directs Dan when they find themselves in these situations. Moments like this used to be few and far between, fever dreams that Dan denied to himself in the way he denied every truth of his heart, but now there’s no point in denying. His old life has faded from view and the new one he’s slowly building is far more pleasing. 

He lets Jones drag him downwards, until their noses slide in to contact and he can feel the breath upon Jones’ lips.

“I draw you, you write me,” Jones sighs, rolling his hips up against Dan’s, sending the most delicious friction burning between them. “Deal?”

Dan just nods frantically as Jones pulls him in for a kiss. It’s been a week since he showed Jones his writing, the novel that he’s finally been brave enough to drag out of his brain and on to paper. And he can’t deny that the protagonist is based on Jones, can’t even try, can’t even pretend that it happened accidentally, but the embarrassment had been worth it for the way Jones had blushed, the way his lips had parted and the way he’d looked up at Dan through his ridiculously long eyelashes. Dan hadn’t been able to deny then, that he was in love, and with that admission things have seemed much simpler, much easier, when once he had thought they’d only get more complicated. 

“I love you,” he gasps, when Jones releases his lips. “I love- I love you.” 

“I know,” Jones whispers, kissing the corner of his lips as his nimble, clever fingers unbuckle first Dan’s belt, then his own, pushing down the fabric that dares to seperate them. “I’ve always known. And I love you.”

Dan nods again, following Jones’ silent directions until they’re both finally free of their clothes, kissing down Jones’ perfect body, breathless and needy as he goes, following the undulations of Jones’ hips, like he’s being drawn by the tide, until his face is pressed to his lover’s thigh and he can gaze up to the angles of the man’s face. He wants to speak a million words in praise of the man stretched out beneath him but doesn’t know where to start, so says nothing. He’ll save them up for later, he decides, for when he sits down with his pen. 

For now he worships silently, revelling in the tug of Jones’ fingers in his hair, the thrust of Jones’ hips, the gasps he makes, a heavenly music. Such simple sounds, but they spark his mind in to life like no others, leaving him more awake than he’d ever been before Jones entered his life, awake to the most blessed intimacy and free of fear in the hands of one who sees him as no one else can.

Later, much later, as he lies among the cushions and rugs and general detritus of the living room floor, boneless and bare, Jones slouches beside him, pencil once more in hand and eyes bright and focused. Dan lets out a laugh, barely a sound, just an exhalation and a smile, and stretches his limbs, hearing his joints snap and pop, no longer caring quite so much, not when Jones is gazing at him with such ready affection. 

He doesn’t quite recognise the record playing but it pulses through him easily, echoing the beat of his heart, and he lets his eyes close, focusing on the faint scratch of pencil on paper, feeling the air shift as warm skin presses against his own, asleep and safe in the sunlight.


End file.
